Dairy and cancer risk

This question is about the potential pros or cons of dairy consumption in terms of cancer risk.
Most of us know the view of L. Cordain, one of the founders of paleo nutrition, on dairy and milk: since these foods were not available to humans until the beginning of the neolithic, chances are that most of us suffer some sort of problem from its consumption, at least in the long run. To quote him "In humans, milk drinking elevates a hormone called IGF-1 which increases growth in children, resulting in an increased adult stature, but it also increases the risk for breast, colon and most particularly prostate cancer. How milk drinking increases IGF-1 is not completely known, but two mechanisms have been proposed: 1) bovine milk contains IGF-1 which crosses the human gut barrier, and 2) IGF-1 concentrations in human blood vary with insulin ??? because milk increases the insulin response so dramatically, then this response in turn may increase IGF-1.". I have also found some studies that share this view like this one on prostate cancer risk: http://www.ajcn.org/content/74/4/549.short

On the other hand (in his "twelve steps...") K. Harris states that, as long as we stick to cream or butter, since these products contain very little or no casein and lactose, the health problems associated with milk will not show up, and we would enjoy the significant nutritional advantages of dairy. While currently I am drinking heavy cream I must say that I feel somehow concerned about the science behind this (i.e. I am not sure whether we have enough information) in particular when it comes to cancer risk, one of the greatest health hazards that we face in the modern world. I would appreciate to know whether you are aware of reliable studies on cancer risk and dairy, in particular as it applies to cream, cheeses or butter.

Dairy plus other crap we eat is different in Masai raw milk and the other stuff they eat. Context. I can easily understand why the Masai dont get cancer on their diet yet Americans will. It is biologically plausible and infact a lot of data to support it.

Faith and the mind body connection play a huge role in recovery. As a neurosurgeon I totally believe that..........but the patient has to know how to access that 6th sense........and it usually is best expresses by a practioner who gets it. I give much credit to faith of the host........but as the guy getting paid for results and sued if I dont.....i cant rely on this when the patient is blocked from using it. I appreciated your intent.....but the context of your advice can not be misunderstood. Glad to have you here.

Travis spot on......the context of IGF 1 matters most....if you feed dairy to a type 2 Diabetic and to a guy who is ripped on HGH with a body fat of 5% and low ultrasensitive CRP......the first guy is going to see himself get a lot worse.......the second guy is going to be animal. I know.....I see them both. Context is critical. And anything that stimulates the first and second insulin spike......but especially the second spike increase IGF1 bigtime.......that is how it works. That is why hyperinsulinemia in the face of high IGF1 is bad news......that is why western docs are anti HGh......

Dairy cause insulin spikes.....infact casein and whey proteins cause it big time. Makes sense too because the oofspring who should drink it need to grow.....the humans who eat it now are not going thru a second pubertal growth spurt are they? Can you tolerate dairy if your cortisol is under good control? Of course........but tolerated does not equal optimal......so then you ask what really is my goal in all this. Then you answer your own riddle.

Cordain had a lot wrong.....but lets give him credit. He at least wrote about the observations he found....and now the next generations will build upon it. He is anthropologist and now we have biochemistists tearing thru his work.....next the clinicians will be examining the data and then the dogma will migrate. Creeping substitution once again at work

Ignacio.....ACCORD is a great one but if you do a literature search of hyperinsulemia or hypercortisolism and cancer be prepared to be overwhelmed by the shear number of links. Where there is smoke there is fire my friend.

no.....more simplistic.....anything that increases cortisol and insulin simultaneously is going to cause disease and eventually shorten our telomeres and then kill us.....The ACCORD trial is supporting evidence to my hypothesis. Moreover, the devil is in the details.....in each cell we carry a copy of of the envirnoment has done to us....and that is a measure of how stable the genome is in the face of adversity. I am writing a note on this as I type for my pratice.

Yeah Cordain tends to do that to support his beliefs. "Oh this Inuit mummy had some atherosclerosis, therefore it was the palmitic acid", "And this Inuit had osteoperosis so this is evidence that acid/alkaline balance is real".
In his defense, it's not greed but a stipulation of being an academic. If we're all going to come together and arrive at the most fruitful beliefs then somebody has to argue for each viewpoint until it is beyond debate.

I found only the abstract to the study which says Results: From meta-analysis of 15 studies the relative risk of stroke and/or heart disease in subjects with high milk or dairy consumption was 0.84 (95% CI 0.76, 0.93) and 0.79 (0.75, 0.82) respectively, relative to the risk in those with low consumption. Four studies reported incident diabetes as an outcome, and the relative risk in the subjects with the highest intake of milk or diary foods was 0.92 (0.86, 0.97)." But did not see anything about cancer rates, though...

BTW I am not trying to reject dairy, in fact as I mentioned I am having cream and butter (not milk) these days, this is about the science behind it, since I have seen rather contradictory studies on the issue.

Dana thanks for your very well written answer. Actually the young Maasai males were still having their "meat, milk, and cattle blood" diet very recently, or perhaps still now, so yes, cancer was very well known. I am not sure though whether it was studied, in serious, statistical terms for that specific population. Cheers!

Dana, RG73 about the Masai "not dropping dead of cancer" I do not know if you have seen actual studies on that, or are just guessing. I know of one well known study on the excellent cardio health of young, male warrior maasai, but have not heard about cancer and Maasai, and also most cancers have high prevalence on older people (those following the traditional diet were just the young males).

Dana, RG73 about the Masai "not dropping dead of cancer" I do not know if you have seen actual studies on that, or are just guessing. I know of one well known study on the excellent cardio health of young, male warrior maasai, but have not heard about cancer and Maasai, and also most cancers have high prevalence on older people (those following the traditional diet where just the young males).

Thanks for your answer. I am not sure, though, when you say "Anyway, it doesn't matter unless we have a mechanism". A large number of scientific results come first from observation of facts, correlation, etc, and sometimes it takes very long (even centuries) to find out which mechanism lies behind the observed phenomena. Anyway I am not endorsing Cordain on this, just curious to know bc I know there are rather different results on this topic.

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Answers

Dairy is bad in the fact of high levels of inflamamtion and hyperinsulinemia......that leads to cancer due to propagation of epidermal growth fators that are selected for in this environment......So the Masai dont get cancer eating dairy because they are not hyperinsulinemic.......same thing with the Kitivans. But if youre an American........you may now understand why in 1900 colon cancer was 37th on the list of cancers that would kill you and today it is now second.

Ignacio.....ACCORD is a great one but if you do a literature search of hyperinsulemia or hypercortisolism and cancer be prepared to be overwhelmed by the shear number of links. Where there is smoke there is fire my friend.

no.....more simplistic.....anything that increases cortisol and insulin simultaneously is going to cause disease and eventually shorten our telomeres and then kill us.....The ACCORD trial is supporting evidence to my hypothesis. Moreover, the devil is in the details.....in each cell we carry a copy of of the envirnoment has done to us....and that is a measure of how stable the genome is in the face of adversity. I am writing a note on this as I type for my pratice.

Dairy cause insulin spikes.....infact casein and whey proteins cause it big time. Makes sense too because the oofspring who should drink it need to grow.....the humans who eat it now are not going thru a second pubertal growth spurt are they? Can you tolerate dairy if your cortisol is under good control? Of course........but tolerated does not equal optimal......so then you ask what really is my goal in all this. Then you answer your own riddle.

My first posting here...
I just thought I would share the latest research finding about the IGF-1 growth hormone in milk, and its relationship to prostate cancer:

Here is a link to the 2012 European study of IGF-1, the growth hormone in milk and other dairy products. The study tested the actual levels in the blood of 1542 adult males with prostate cancer vs. 1542 matched non-cancerous males. Higher amounts of IGF-1 in the blood of males correlated with a 69% higher incidence of prostate cancer!
http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/21/9/1531.abstract

This is about as good evidence as you are ever likely to get--even stronger than the early tobacco/lung cancer findings! As for the best possible scientific proof---double-blind randomized testing of large numbers of males---it just isn't possible. How could someone be double-blind as to whether they are eating ice cream or cheese, etc for the decades it takes to develop full-blown prostate cancer? Similarly, it has been impossible to set up double-blind tests of tobacco smoking, yet we now accept that tobacco smoking causes lung cancer.

Incidentally, IGF-1 is not affected by pasteurization or the production of cheese, yoghurt, or ice cream. It is found in all dairy products. I guess IGF-1 is indestructible! Prostates aren't. Sorry about that....

I was under the impression that it's the downregulation of the IGF-1 receptor that causes cancer cell death, not that IGF-1 causes cancer. What's bad for a cancer patient isn't necessarily bad for a healthy person. I doubt that even supra-physiological doses of exogenous hGH (and thus massive spikes in IGF-1) like what occurs with bodybuilders would be enough to cause cancer, though it would be less than ideal if cancer cells were already present.

Travis spot on......the context of IGF 1 matters most....if you feed dairy to a type 2 Diabetic and to a guy who is ripped on HGH with a body fat of 5% and low ultrasensitive CRP......the first guy is going to see himself get a lot worse.......the second guy is going to be animal. I know.....I see them both. Context is critical. And anything that stimulates the first and second insulin spike......but especially the second spike increase IGF1 bigtime.......that is how it works. That is why hyperinsulinemia in the face of high IGF1 is bad news......that is why western docs are anti HGh......

Right, because Maasai who eat their traditional diet are dropping dead from cancer.

Saying that we should avoid foods discovered or developed during the Neolithic is a shorthand for healthful eating, nothing more. If you were to sit down and pick apart every food we developed during the Neolithic you'd find that some of them (admittedly not all) have been demonstrated to be healthful. By "healthful" I mean they provide for some macronutrient or micronutrient that we need, without also providing antinutrients that wreck our health.

So when Cordain can show that milk contains actual antinutrients, I'll be convinced no one should use it as a food.

Just smelling food provokes an insulin response. Shall we all hold our noses in the immediate vicinity of food now? Kind of hard to prepare food that way, much less eat it.

Getting back to the Neolithic thing: again, it is a shorthand, for people who don't have the time or inclination to investigate every possible food hazard. Just like telling people "eat low-fat" lets us avoid trans fats and telling us "eat low-carb" lets us avoid excessive fructose--but both those pieces of advice fail to account for the healthfulness of certain foods. Low-fatters miss out on saturated fats; low-carbers oftentimes don't adopt organ meats as a food and therefore run the risk of micronutrient deficiency. What do you suppose modern "Paleo" eaters might be missing? Sometimes rather a lot, depending on their individual likes, dislikes, daily habits, etc. Someone who has no time to make bone broth, like ever, is going to be missing important minerals because while there are minerals present in plant foods they're not always the most bioavailable.

It's a trade-off.

I think insulin's only important in terms of cancer development (1) if you are also eating a lot of digestible carb for sugar to feed a cancer and (2) if your immune system is messed up enough that it's not adequately policing cancer cells--which, incidentally, your body makes all the time, but usually it kills them off before they become a threat. Basically, if you're healthy (at least the way most of us here would define it), you probably don't have anything to worry about. I say "probably" because environmental factors may play a role, and of course past damage may play a role, the more unhealthy you were when you came to the Paleo lifestyle in the first place.

I'm not saying people have to eat dairy, but I think it is getting an unfair rap, hence my snarky tone earlier here. If you just can't take the casein then don't eat it, or be very careful about using clarified butter only. (Can't guarantee that cream doesn't have any.) The lactose question is easily solved with fermentation or skimming or aging (depending on what the dairy food happens to be). If you hate the stuff then find other ways to get the minerals--and the fats; one of the problems with modern meat, quite aside from omega-3/omega-6 ratios, is we just plain eat it too young. We have somehow gotten it into our heads that young animals are gastronomically superior to older ones. That's fine in a pastoral culture to keep the herd a manageable size, but pastoral isn't quite Paleo--and every mammal that hunts grazing animals goes for the slower and the fatter, including us before we discovered animal husbandry. The younger, the leaner. (This is why Big Beef adopted the practice of grain-finishing, ultimately: it mimics the process of aging in the animal, including the laying on of muscle marbling, aka fat.) Dairy works to replace some of the dietary fat we lost when we didn't have to limit ourselves to the old fogies of the herd, and you don't have to import it from a Pacific island (i.e., coconut oil), either. Which, I like coconut oil, I'm just saying.

So... up to you really.

P.S., Before someone argues that maybe the Maasai were dropping dead from cancer and we just didn't know, cancer was a known disease well before the advent of the biopsy. This is why we know President Grant died of throat cancer. Doctors in Africa have also long known when someone had cancer that had advanced far enough, even if they didn't have microscopes; there are certain classic symptoms they looked for. And sometimes you just couldn't avoid knowing. Gary Taubes recounts one doctor who observed an African woman dying of advanced breast cancer, to the point it had eaten through her ribcage and he could see her heart beating through her skin. So if the Maasai were dropping dead of cancer on their traditional diet it should have been pretty obvious.

Dana thanks for your very well written answer. Actually the young Maasai males were still having their "meat, milk, and cattle blood" diet very recently, or perhaps still now, so yes, cancer was very well known. I am not sure though whether it was studied, in serious, statistical terms for that specific population. Cheers!

Dairy plus other crap we eat is different in Masai raw milk and the other stuff they eat. Context. I can easily understand why the Masai dont get cancer on their diet yet Americans will. It is biologically plausible and infact a lot of data to support it.

Correlation without causation. This is typical Cordain cherry picking the data. Oh, some populations, the ones that have a whole bunch of other potential causal factors for cancer development, also drink a lot of milk and get a lot of cancer. Except for, oh, the Masai. Or, oh, except for Tibetan yak herders or other traditional dairy cultures that he completely willfully ignores (probably b/c they also eat ridiculous amounts of sat fat and Cordain is still a little sat fat phobic). Yes, I suppose it is entirely possible that the Masai have, in the few thousand years they've been herders, evolved anti-cancer defenses in response to their diet. Seems ridiculous to me. I suppose he might argue that, at least among the Masai, milk drinking is high only for part of an individuals life (when men are in the "warrior" group).

Anyway, it doesn't matter unless we have a mechanism. Give milk to mice or rats in the lab and show me the mechanism whereby milk increases mutation rate, disables cellular repair mechanisms and leads to cancer. Short of that, there is no science, just epidemiologists playing connect the dots and doing really bad statistics. And the problem with Cordain's assertions is that you can find plenty of correlation studies showing milk consumption being preventative against cancer and other diseases (see Elwood et al. 2008 for example).

Milk products causing allergies and inflammation, sure, I buy it. You can demonstrate that in the lab. Cancer? Show me that you can give a mouse or a rhesus monkey cancer by having it consume a lot of milk from another species.

Yeah Cordain tends to do that to support his beliefs. "Oh this Inuit mummy had some atherosclerosis, therefore it was the palmitic acid", "And this Inuit had osteoperosis so this is evidence that acid/alkaline balance is real".
In his defense, it's not greed but a stipulation of being an academic. If we're all going to come together and arrive at the most fruitful beliefs then somebody has to argue for each viewpoint until it is beyond debate.

I found only the abstract to the study which says Results: From meta-analysis of 15 studies the relative risk of stroke and/or heart disease in subjects with high milk or dairy consumption was 0.84 (95% CI 0.76, 0.93) and 0.79 (0.75, 0.82) respectively, relative to the risk in those with low consumption. Four studies reported incident diabetes as an outcome, and the relative risk in the subjects with the highest intake of milk or diary foods was 0.92 (0.86, 0.97)." But did not see anything about cancer rates, though...

Thanks for your answer. I am not sure, though, when you say "Anyway, it doesn't matter unless we have a mechanism". A large number of scientific results come first from observation of facts, correlation, etc, and sometimes it takes very long (even centuries) to find out which mechanism lies behind the observed phenomena. Anyway I am not endorsing Cordain on this, just curious to know bc I know there are rather different results on this topic.

Cordain had a lot wrong.....but lets give him credit. He at least wrote about the observations he found....and now the next generations will build upon it. He is anthropologist and now we have biochemistists tearing thru his work.....next the clinicians will be examining the data and then the dogma will migrate. Creeping substitution once again at work

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I have to rant here. In my opinion, its the same old story as with the "MEAT CAUSES CANCER" statement, and as with milk, there is an equal body of scientific work that "proves" the theory.
But the problem of the studies is that they never give people the quality milk or meat, then IMHO the conclusions made should be fair and state what kind of milk/dairy was used rather than making blanket statements.

Also, if you look at some of the studies that track people who eat these products in the highly processed state and then don't account for the other dietary factors. For example, are they also eating tons of sugar and processed foods, no vegetables etc... So then where is the proof that they caused the cancer in the first place?

Hello, this is a question I wanted to ask myself but as this thread already exists I would like to contribute and possibly find further information: I have just discovered this link:http://www.fitnesspoint.com.pt/pdf/Milk-ThepromoterofchronicWesterndiseases.pdf
which seems to be pretty clear on the IGF-1 issue. However, if I understand it correctly, whey does not increase IGF-1 but produces insuline-spikes. If not too worried about this, is seems "safe"to have whey and cheeses made from whey? And, more important, does anyone know about fermented dairy? The amount of IGF-1 seems to be reduced but I do not know exact numbers...Thank you for a reply!

In the English language the word ???cancer???, besides the medical definition, is synonymous with ???evil???, ???scourge???, ???blight??? and ???corruption???. Moreover, each of the synonyms actually describes the various facets of the character of a malignant tumor. First, being ???evil???, the cancer has no consideration for its neighbors and will destroy them to occupy their space as it grows. Second, a ???scourge??? is one who sets out with a singular purpose to cause harm and destroy. Such an entity has no mercy or caring for others. Third, corruption denotes a part of a whole that is altered from its intended purpose or function in a way that disrupts and destroys, with a loss of integrity whereby an entity no longer fulfils its obligations. Additionally, corruption symbolizes a completely self-serving existence with no regard for the consequences of a breach of trust. These definitions accurately describe the aberrant cancer cells that spin off from normal ones with a mutated DNA infrastructure. Therefore in the treatment approach one needs to incorporate an adjustment in one's way of thinking from illusionary independence to nullifying one's ego to the extent of acknowledging that nothing is indpendent of G-d, In so doing one gains a unity with the Almighty allowing the infinite light to break through the exterior shell and dispell the darkness. Integrating such meditative techniques with the various established forms of treatment can go a long way in effecting remission. More at http://moshe-sharon-wordsmith.com

Faith and the mind body connection play a huge role in recovery. As a neurosurgeon I totally believe that..........but the patient has to know how to access that 6th sense........and it usually is best expresses by a practioner who gets it. I give much credit to faith of the host........but as the guy getting paid for results and sued if I dont.....i cant rely on this when the patient is blocked from using it. I appreciated your intent.....but the context of your advice can not be misunderstood. Glad to have you here.